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Time zone
A time zone is a region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. Most adjacent time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offset from (see also ). Standard time zones can be defined by geometrically subdividing the Earth's into 24 s (wedge-shaped sections), bordered by meridians each 15° of longitude apart. The local time in neighbouring zones would differ by one hour. However, political and geographical practicalities can result in irregularly-shaped zones that follow political boundaries or that change their time seasonally (as with daylight saving time), as well as being subject to occasional redefinition as political conditions change. There are variations of the definitions of time zone which generally fall into two meanings: a time zone can represent a region where the local time is some fixed offset from a global reference (usually UTC), or a time zone can represent a region throughout which the local time is always consistent even though the offset may fluctuate seasonally. Before the adoption of time zones, people used local solar time (originally apparent solar time, as with a sundial; and, later, mean solar time). Mean solar time is the average over a year of apparent solar time. Its difference from apparent solar time is the equation of time. This became increasingly awkward as and s improved, because clocks differed between places by an amount corresponding to the difference in their geographical longitude, which was usually not a convenient number. This problem could be solved by synchronizing the clocks in all localities, but then in many places the local time would differ markedly from the solar time to which people are accustomed. Time zones are thus a compromise, relaxing the complex geographic dependence while still allowing local time to approximate the mean solar time. There has been a general trend to push the boundaries of time zones further west of their designated meridians in order to create a permanent daylight saving time effect. The increase in worldwide communication has further increased the need for interacting parties to communicate mutually comprehensible time references to one another. Standard time zones Earlier, time zones based their time on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, also called UT1), the mean solar time at longitude 0° (the Prime Meridian). But as a mean solar time, GMT is defined by the rotation of the Earth, which is not constant in rate. So, the rate of s was annually changed or steered to closely match GMT. But on , it became fixed, using predefined leap seconds instead of rate changes. This new time system is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Leap seconds are inserted to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1. In this way, local times continue to correspond approximately to mean solar time, while the effects of variations in Earth's rotation rate are confined to simple step changes that can be easily subtracted if a uniform time scale (International Atomic Time or TAI) is desired. With the implementation of UTC, nations began to use it in the definition of their time zones instead of GMT. As of 2005, most but not all nations have altered the definition of local time in this way (though many media outlets fail to make a distinction between GMT and UTC). Further change to the basis of time zones may occur if proposals to abandon leap seconds succeed. Due to daylight saving time, UTC is local time at the only between 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in October and 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in March. For the rest of the year, local time there is , known in the as British Summer Time (BST). Similar circumstances apply in many places. The definition for time zones can be written in short form as UTC±''n'' (or GMT±''n''), where n'' is the offset in hours. These examples give the local time at various locations at 12:00 UTC when daylight saving time (or summer time, etc.) is not in effect: * , , : ; 04:00 * , : ; 08:00 * , , : ; 07:00 * , : ; 13:00 * , : ; 14:00 * , : ; 17:30 * , : ; 21:00 * , : ; 22:00 Where the adjustment for time zones results in a time at the other side of midnight from UTC, then the date at the location is one day later or earlier. Some examples when UTC is 23:00 on Monday when daylight saving time is not in effect: * , : UTC+2; 01:00 on Tuesday * , : ; 11:00 on Tuesday Some examples when UTC is 02:00 on Tuesday when daylight saving time is not in effect: * , , United States: ; 21:00 on Monday * , , United States: ; 16:00 on Monday The time-zone adjustment for a specific location may vary because of Daylight Saving Time. For example New Zealand, which is usually , observes a one-hour daylight saving time adjustment during the southern hemisphere summer, resulting in a local time of . See also Sidereal time. History Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675, when the was built, as an aid to determine longitude at sea by mariners. The first time zone in the world was established by British on , — with GMT hand-carried on chronometers. About , , time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the . Even though 98% of 's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until , . Some old clocks from this period have two minute hands — one for the local time, one for GMT.Bristol Time This only applied to the island of Great Britain, and not to the island of . On , , (then a British colony) officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172° 30' East of , that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as . Timekeeping on the American railroads in the mid nineteenth century was somewhat confused. Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, and the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. Some major railroad junctions served by several different railroads had a separate clock for each railroad, each showing a different time; the main station in , , for example, kept six different times. The confusion for travelers making a long journey involving several changes of train can be imagined. proposed a system of one-hour standard time zones for American railroads about 1863, although he published nothing on the matter at that time and did not consult railroad officials until 1869. In 1870, he proposed four ideal time zones (having north–south borders), the first centered on , but by 1872 the first was centered 75°W of Greenwich, with geographic borders (for example, sections of the ). Dowd's system was never accepted by American railroads. Instead, U.S. and Canadian railroads implemented their own version on Sunday, , , also called "The Day of Two Noons", when each railroad station clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone. The zones were named Intercolonial, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Within one year, 85% of all cities with populations over 10,000, about 200 cities, were using standard time. A notable exception was (which is nearly half-way between the meridians of eastern time and central time, though actually a little closer to central), which kept local time until 1900, then tried Central Standard Time, , and before a May 1915 ordinance settled on EST and was ratified by popular vote in August 1916. This hodgepodge ended when Standard zone time was formally adopted by the on , as the Standard Time Act. Time zones were first proposed for the entire world by 's Sir in 1876 as an appendage to the single 24-hour clock he proposed for the entire world (located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian). In 1879 he specified that his universal day would begin at the anti-meridian of Greenwich (now called 180°), while conceding that hourly time zones might have some limited local use. He continued to advocate his system at subsequent international conferences. In October 1884, the did not adopt his time zones because they were not within its purview. The conference did adopt a universal day of 24 hours beginning at Greenwich midnight, but specified that it "shall not interfere with the use of local or standard time where desirable". Nevertheless, most major countries had adopted hourly time zones by 1929. Today, all nations use standard time zones for secular purposes, but they do not all apply the concept as originally conceived. , India, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, the , as well as parts of Australia use half-hour deviations from standard time, and some nations, such as Nepal and the use quarter-hour deviations. Nautical time zones Before 1920, all ships kept local apparent time on the high seas by setting their clocks at night or at the morning sight so that, given the ship's speed and direction, it would be 12 o'clock when the Sun crossed the ship's meridian (12 o'clock = local apparent noon). During 1917, at the Anglo-French Conference on Time-keeping at Sea, it was recommended that all ships, both military and civilian, should adopt hourly standard time zones on the high seas. A ship within the of any nation would use that nation's standard time. The captain was permitted to change his ship's clocks at a time of his choice following his ship's entry into another time zone—he often chose midnight. These zones were adopted by all major fleets between 1920 and 1925 but not by many independent merchant ships until . Time on a ship's clocks and in a ship's log had to be stated along with a "zone description", which was the number of hours to be added to zone time to obtain GMT, hence '''zero' in the Greenwich time zone, with negative numbers from −1 to −12 for time zones to the east and positive numbers from +1 to +12 to the west (hours, minutes, and seconds for nations without an hourly offset). These signs are opposite to those given below because ships must obtain GMT from zone time, not zone time from GMT. All zones were pole-to-pole staves 15° wide, except −12 and +12 which were each 7.5° wide, with the 180° meridian separating them. Unlike the zig-zagging land-based International Date Line, the nautical International Date Line follows 180° except where it is interrupted by territorial waters and the lands they border, including islands. About 1950, a letter suffix was added to the zone description, assigning Z''' to the Zero Zone, and A–M (except J) to the east and N–Y to the west (J may be assigned to local time in non-nautical applications; zones M and Y have the same clock time but differ by 24 hours: a full day). These were to be vocalized using a which included '''Zulu for GMT, leading sometimes to the use of the term "Zulu Time". The Greenwich time zone runs from 7.5°W to 7.5°E Longitude, while zone A runs from 7.5°E to 22.5°E Longitude, etc. These nautical letters have been added to some time zone maps, like the map of Standard Time Zones by (NAO), which extended the letters by adding an asterisk (*) or (†) for areas that do not use a nautical time zone, and a double dagger (‡) for areas that do not have a legal standard time ( 's and all of . The specifies UTC−3 for the , but no other country recognizes that). They conveniently ignore any zone that does not have an hour or half-hour offset, so a double dagger (‡) has been co-opted for these zones in the list of time zones. In maritime usage, GMT retains its historical meaning of UT1, the mean solar time at Greenwich. UTC, atomic time at Greenwich, is too inaccurate, differing by as much as 0.9 s from UT1, creating an error of 0.4 km in longitude at the equator. However, can be added to UTC to correct it to within 50 ms of UT1, reducing the error to only 20 m. Skewing of zones (in purple)]] Ideal time zones, such as nautical time zones, are based on the mean solar time of a particular meridian located in the middle of that zone with boundaries located 7.5 degrees east and west of the meridian. In practice, zone boundaries are often drawn much farther to the west with often irregular boundaries, and some locations base their time on meridians located far to the east. For example, even though the Prime Meridian (0°) passes through and , they use the mean solar time of 15 degrees east (Central European Time) rather than 0 degrees (Greenwich Mean Time). France used to use GMT, but it was switched to CET during the German Occupation and did not switch back after the war. The tendency to draw time zone boundaries far to the west of their meridians allows greater utilization of more daylight in the afternoon hours. Many of these locations also use daylight saving time which means that solar noon could occur later than 14:00 by the clock. In a more extreme example, is at 165°24′W longitude, which is just west of center of the idealized (165°W). Nevertheless, Nome observes (135°W) with DST so it is slightly more than two hours ahead of the sun in winter and over three in summer. |accessdate=2007-05-11}} Trivia * has the largest number of time zones: eleven, including on the . In terms of distinct time zones, Canada and the United States are tied for second with six, while Australia has seven time zones that always overlap to some degree. * If the possessions of the , the and are included it increases the number of time zones in each. Taking into account overseas territories and possessions, France has the most, with at least twelve time zones, followed by Australia with ten, the United States with nine and the United Kingdom with at least eight. * In terms of area, China is the largest country with only one time zone ( ). Before the Communist control of the mainland in 1949 during the , . China also has the widest spanning time zone. * Stations in generally keep the time of their supply bases, thus both the (U.S.) and (U.S.) use time ( southern winter, southern summer). * The 27° N latitude passes back and forth across time zones in South Asia. Pakistan: +5, India +5:30, Nepal , India ( ) +5:30, China +8:00, Bhutan +6:00, India ( ) +5:30, Myanmar +6:30. This switching was more odd in 2002, when enabled Daylight Saving Time. Thus from west to east, time zones were: +6:00, +5:30, +5:45, +5:30, +8:00, +6:00, +5:30 and +6:30. * Because the earliest and latest time zones are 26 hours apart, any given calendar date exists at some point on the globe for 50 hours. For example, begins in time zone at 10:00 UTC , and ends in time zone at 12:00 UTC . * There are numerous places where several time zones meet, for instance at the tri-country border of Finland, Norway and Russia. * There are about 39 time zones instead of 24 (as popularly believed). This is due to fractional hour offsets and zones with offsets larger than 12 hours near the International Date Line. Some s may use offsets that are not recognized by all authorities. * The largest time gap along a political border is the 3.5 hour gap along the border of (UTC +8) and ( ). * One of the most unusual time zones is the Australian Central Western Time zone (CWST), which is a small strip of from the border of west to E125.5°, just before . It is 8¾ hours ahead of UTC (UTC+8:45) and covers an area of about 35,000 km², larger than Belgium, but has a population of about 200. Although unofficial, it is universally respected in the area--as without it, the time gap in standard time at E129° (the WA/SA border) would be 1.5 hours. See . Internet and computer systems UTC is used on the Internet for meetings (i.e. chats, news, shows and so on). The format is based in the Note "datetime". On the other hand, most modern computer s include information about time zones, including the capability to automatically change the local time when daylight saving starts and finishes (see the article on daylight saving time for more details on this aspect). NTP The protocol used the most to synchronize time with multiple sources across the internet is (NTP). It operates across multiple platforms and there are a wide array of public servers available on the internet to synchronize with. Every server is normally kept updated with an belonging to the standards institution of each country. Normally a large organization has an internal server to keep time with one of the public NTP servers on the internet, and then this server acts as a proxy and becomes the official timekeeper for all organization machines. NTP is so popular now that virtually all -capable devices implement some degree of NTP client software. Unix Most systems, including and , keep system time as UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Rather than having a single timezone set for the whole computer, timezone offsets can vary for different processes. Standard library routines are used to calculate the local time based on the current timezone, normally supplied to processes through the TZ environment variable. This allows users in multiple timezones to use the same computer, with their respective local times displayed correctly to each user. Timezone information is most commonly stored in a timezone database known as (or sometimes tz or Olson format). In fact, many systems, including anything using the , can make use of this database. Microsoft Windows based computer systems normally keep system time as local time in a particular time zone. A system database of timezone information includes the offset from UTC and rules that indicate the start and end dates for daylight saving in each zone. Application software is able to calculate the time in various zones, but there is no standard way for users from multiple zones to use a single server and have their own local time presented to them. Smalltalk Each dialect comes with its own built-in classes for dates, times and timestamps, only a few of which implement the DateAndTime and Duration classes as specified by the ANSI Smalltalk Standard. provides a TimeZone class that supports up to 2 annually-recurring offset transitions, which are assumed to apply to all years (same behavior as Windows time zones.) provides a Timezone class that does not support any offset transitions. does not support time zones at all. For full support of the ( ) in a Smalltalk application (including support for any number of annually-recurring offset transitions, and support for different intra-year offset transition rules in different years) the third-party, open-source, ANSI-Smalltalk-compliant Chronos Date/Time Library is available for use with any of the following Smalltalk dialects: VisualWorks, Squeak or Dolphin. Java While most application software will use the underlying operating system for timezone information, , from version 1.3.1, has maintained its own timezone database. This database (as well as the operating system database) will need to be updated whenever timezone rules change. One unfortunate problem is that the date of the start of daylight saving time was altered by the government for year 2000 to accommodate the . This altered date was included with the Sun . Python The standard module stores and operates on the timezone information class . The third party pytz module provides access to the full zoneinfo database. Databases Some s allow storage of a datetime type having time zone information. Oracle Oracle Database is configured with a database time zone, and connecting clients are configured with session time zones. Oracle Database uses two data types to store time zone information: ; TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE : Stores date and time information with the offset from UTC ; TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE : Stores date and time information with respect to the dbtimezone (which cannot be changed so long as there is a column in the db of this type), automatically adjusting the date and time from the stored time zone to the client's session time zone. PostgreSQL uses the datatype. It stores as UTC time, but operates on the current timezone, which could be different with every . Addition of the time includes daylight saving time. References * Bowditch, Nathaniel. American Practical Navigator. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1925, 1939, 1975. * Hill, John C., Thomas F. Utegaard, Gerard Riordan. Dutton's Navigation and Piloting. Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1958. * Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-19-215948-8. * . Pole to Pole. Bay Books, 1995. ISBN 0-912333-41-3. See also * * List of time zones * wikipedia:Category:Time by country * Daylight saving time * * External links * The tz database - Provides specific information on the beginning and ending dates of daylight saving time for each zone and tracks time zones over the years. Often called tz or , this database is used by several implementations, including the used by many variants. * US Official Time Clock - Java enabled clock to graphically display night and day around the globe. * The World Clock - Time zones * Date and Time Gateway - Get current time in major cities * Time Zones of Russia * W3C Note Datetime. Category:Timekeeping